


and we will possess

by Dayadhvam



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Collateral Damage, Gen, Loss of Faith, the aftermath of possession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-03
Updated: 2010-08-03
Packaged: 2017-12-27 23:36:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/984984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dayadhvam/pseuds/Dayadhvam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amelia stopped praying, among other things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and we will possess

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2010 femgenficathon VI round; prompt #77: Lucretia Mott— _We too often bind ourselves by authorities rather than by the truth._ Title is from Pablo Neruda's "Enigma for the Worried" (trans. William O'Daly). Thanks to kalliel for looking over this.
>
>> And we will possess a satanic power  
> to turn back or speed up the hours:  
> to arrive at birth or at death  
> like an engine stolen from the infinite.  
> 

“Hey, you all right?” asked one of the men, the shorter one with shorter hair whom the angel Castiel had called Dean. She remembered him from the house before the demon had taken her on the way to the car, before it blocked most of her time out and left only the worst moments as taunting reminders in her head.

Knotted ropes around the chair. Blood on the floor. Within the jumble of memories what she recalled with the greatest clarity were the last words she’d said to Jimmy, those which she could truly claim as her own.

_Get the hell away from us_. Funny, she had never thought herself a prophet.

“Mrs. Novak? Look, he should have said something to you, he’s just a bastard like that, but—we should get out of here.”

She blinked, a slow flutter of eyelashes. “Yes,” she said, looking away from where Castiel had blinked out of space. “Yes, I suppose we should.” She got to her feet, arms still around Claire, her Claire who leaned pale and silent against her—

—but at least now it was not the angel who looked at her and spoke with a voice so unlike her daughter’s that she had thought her heart would stop from the terror, for even as she protested that heaven could not be so callous as to ruin her family she had seen them going, gone. The angels had taken them one by one and walked in their bodies with gaits too measured to be instinctive, their voices clear and dispassionate and their eyes filled with the dimmed light of distant, unknown stars. They wore no halos of golden warmth but the cold spirit of the inevitable.

She dipped her head down and pressed her lips against her daughter’s hair and looked up, gripping Claire’s shoulder to banish the memory of the gun in her hand. Scratchy cloth instead of smooth metal under her skin. “They’ll come after us again?” she asked, and was surprised that her voice did not waver. “Jimmy—Jimmy said Castiel would protect us, but he came so late. It’ll be so hard to explain the house, and the demons. And my friends.” _Roger and Anita. Oh god._

“It’ll be so hard to explain,” she tried again, and felt like a fool.

“I don’t know. They might. Cas will be looking out for you, you should make sure to protect yourselves—”

“I know _that_ already,” she said. “But Castiel was too late in coming.”

“Well,” Dean said. “He’s… okay, for an angel.” He didn’t look her in the eye, for Castiel’s parting words still lingered in the air.

_That doesn’t mean very much_ , but she swallowed the words back down her throat and said nothing. The angels only served heaven, and she realized now that she knew little of heaven, did not know much except that the angels were not human and did not show any understanding of them except as objects of interest or disinterest, nor did they seem to want to understand: an uncomprehending, casual cruelty in their disconnection. The demons had attacked them without regard and the angels had left them without regard and there was nothing for her to do but think how to live her next days.

“What does it matter? My husband is gone.” She breathed out slowly in the silence. “Castiel can’t be around all the time, it’s got more important things to do. Can we go back to the house? If the demons can find us anyway, then it doesn’t matter where we are—we might as well stay here.”

“Jimmy wanted you to go to your friends’ place—“

“We can’t put them in danger like that. I do that, it’ll be the same as what happened to us.” She pressed her lips tightly together and walked past Dean to the other brother; dug into her pocket to hand him a handkerchief. He murmured his thanks but his eyes slid past her to Dean and his shoulders stiffened, like a cat raising its hackles. “Just tell me how to keep them away from us. Don’t worry,” she said to him. “I’ll wash it later. It’s not like it’ll stain.”

He stared at her, eyes dark and set in the shadowed hollows of his face, and then handed the handkerchief back to her. He drew the sleeve of his shirt across his mouth but only succeeded in smearing the blood further. “It’s okay,” he muttered. “You need it more than I do.”

She tucked the handkerchief away instead of wiping her face. Let herself pretend for a moment longer.

“Daddy poured salt from the pantry,” Claire said. “That helped, didn’t it?”

“Yeah. There are some things you can do,” Dean said, and looked hard at his brother before he turned and walked to the door. “Stuff for exorcisms and for containment, we can tell you a little what you need to know before we go. It’s—only right that you should know.”

Claire took her hand. “It’s okay, Mom,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. Her energy was spent and taken away with Castiel, a look of lingering shell-shock in her eyes. “We’ll be safe until everything’s finished. The angel promised.”

Yet in her voice there was no conviction. Claire was twelve and already her faith was gone, for faith was what you needed to believe in that which remained unseen. But they were no longer so blind, and the sight had burnt the faith right out of them and left them as ashes.

*

She called 911. On the phone she heard the dispatcher’s voice asking about the situation, and then she began sobbing hard into the receiver and told the person her address and could not say much else, could only imagine the yellow police tape spanning the porch, draped as garish decoration along the tables and carpet and over Roger and Anita who lay still as fallen statues. She knelt on the floor, forehead pressed against the wall so she would not see them. “Just come,” she said numbly, “please, now.” She tried to picture Jimmy’s face, the shy sweet smile before he leaned forward and kissed her for the first time and the stunned horror in his eyes as he bled and struggled, the beginning and the end as she knew him, but when the image of his face came to mind she saw Castiel staring coolly back at her, and the line of Jimmy’s mouth remained fixed and implacable.

*

Anita’s father had wept on her shoulder at the funeral, having outlived both wife and daughter. This was the way she said it was supposed to go: friends over to visit, the thieves suddenly coming through—Jimmy was kept out of the story easily enough, and she’d cleaned up the salt on the pantry floor and saved it for later, just in case. People patted her on the back and murmured their sympathies and inquired _how are you?_ She hated the question by now and often considered saying, deadpan, _I’m always afraid demons are possessing the people around me and getting ready to attack. Jimmy’s off with the angels and I’m just so sick of it all. By the way, do you have any spare salt?_

If they would think her mad, as she had thought of Jimmy, she wouldn’t blame them.

“Whoa, you hang around here nowadays?”

She jerked back in surprise and groped about in her jacket for the silver canteen and turned and—she said, “Oh!” It was only Kevin from work. Dark hair graying at the temples, slight wiry build, hazel eyes that were not black, and she kept her eyes on his to make sure the hazel stayed that way, her mouth relaxing into a careful smile. “Hey, it’s good to see you.” She released the canteen from her grip and slid her hand out of her pocket; people probably found it a very odd reflex, but she didn’t care. She held the gun tight in her other hand.

“You too. You need the time off—you’ve had a rough year. Everyone on my floor misses you though. Who’s going to fix our computers for us now? Though I didn’t think you’d come here to a place like this, not a shooting range.” The curtain of pity began to fall across his face. “After that break-in at your house…”

“I know,” she said tersely. “I just need to—settle things. Stress. I don’t think Claire’s dealing very well with everything. She never goes into the living room, where—you know.” She thought of the newspaper articles Claire printed out and taped to her bedroom walls, wanted to say to her _no, you can’t go on wild goose chases, not now_ but didn’t, was afraid of how contrary Claire might be.

“You have guts to stay in that house.” Kevin shook his head. “Jane says so. She wouldn’t be able to bear it, would just move right out.”

“I thought about it,” she replied. “But I couldn’t. It’s just—it’s been my home for so _long_.” You couldn’t abandon a place so easily where you had lived and loved for more than a decade. Jimmy had been in charge of the curtains, the furniture, the carpeting, had chosen the sheer red cloth to hang across the oval window of the front door while she badgered the electrician about fixing the garage lights. Since then, she’d only had one small makeover; her new decorations were salt lines overlaid with white paint at the doors and on the windowsills, devil’s traps drawn on the undersides of the welcome mat and the rugs in the house, simple glass vases in every room filled with holy water. Every week she put in fresh flowers.

Kevin scratched his head, hemmed and hawed. “You haven’t heard anything about Ji—?”

“Nothing from the hospitals,” she said automatically, for she had answered the same question a thousand times and the pain of her ignorance had begun to dull to an ache. Now that she knew what her husband had actually been doing, the despair came over her once again, sat heavily like toxic sludge in her stomach and refused to be dislodged. “I don’t know anymore.”

He sighed. “Yeah.” Didn’t they all. Kevin clapped her on the shoulder. “I’m heading out, but let me know if there’s anything we can do for you. Come in to say hi, won’t you? We’d all like to see you more. I’ve got some of Jane’s cookies in my office, drop by sometime.”

She nodded and smiled briefly in acknowledgment. “Thanks.” Turned away and raised the gun, figured that she could probably hit the upper torso half the time by now, though the gunshot sound and the recoil and the nervous jerks of her own hands often threw her off. It wasn’t perfect, but her body had possessed aim perfect enough when the gun was pointed at Jimmy and shot him in the gut even as she watched through her eyes and tried to stop it but could not. If she was going to shoot anything again, she thought, she could shoot to defend.

*

Claire had started to look at Latin on her own and picked the language up with disturbing ease; in school she daydreamed and doodled little abstruse signs in the margins of her notes, and at night she slept fitfully and woke up soon after the sun greeted the horizon and faint red rays trailed through the sky like unwound skeins of thread. This her mother knew, from the elementary Latin textbook in Claire’s room and the teacher’s-comments-to-the-parent(s) and the noise from the kitchen that indicated breakfast made at half past six in the morning. Perhaps the thermostat in hell had been turned down all the way, because she’d had such a difficult time in dragging Claire from her bed for school before. Jimmy had been the lenient one. _Let her sleep in a bit more? I don’t mind driving her and getting quality daddy time with my girl_ , he would say. _No_ , and she would shake her head, once flicked him on the nose and grinned at his rueful look. _Claire, take the bus. I won’t let Daddy coddle you all the time, dear_. Now she regretted it but she could not have foretold his absence. Claire didn’t seem affected by the lack of restful sleep, but she had developed the habit of sitting in the backyard with a book, where she would later be found turning her face up to the sky. As if there instead of words on a page she could reach out and read the will of heaven.

*

The computer screen blurred before her eyes and she sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose, the lines of code meshing into gibberish. No glasses, not for now. She could indulge her vanity a bit.

The murmur of voices in the nearby dining room rose and fell. “—I think he should have assigned a different visual for this. Like, make a diorama or something, it’d be so much more fun.”

Claire made a noncommittal sound. “I don’t mind drawing, it’s pretty cool to see how the formations changed. I mean, those soldiers marched like robots under the general’s orders.’”

“Yeah, I totally feel like that right now.”

“Julie—“

“With Gettysburg, Mr. Scott is really going to be paying attention. It’s his favorite Civil War battle. We can’t just leave it at, ‘Oh, the North won over the South.’”

“He’d spend half the class giving our presentation for us, and then he’d fail us. Yeah. Anyway, both sides had both bad and good points, we can just go through all of them. It’s not like their plans didn’t get messed up by random stuff. Charging down Little Round Top when the Union soldiers were running out of ammunition? Just think about it.”

“What, they had guts? We _all_ have guts, I’m just picky about when I’m gonna be using them.”

“Like when Adam dared you to kiss his pet frog—“

“—oh no, don’t you even bring that up—“

The playful squabbling turned into conspiratorial giggling. She smiled at their antics but the pressure behind her eyes became periodic pinpricks of pain so she slid away from the desk and turned to look outside to focus on the trees through the window.

Most of the snow had melted away throughout the day and left traces of white which lay soft as feathers upon the ground and which would almost certainly vanish in a matter of hours. But for now as long as it lasted she watched daylight dance across the lawn and pushed up the window to let in fresh air, touched with chill, her fingers brushing against uneven grains in the windowsill. Time to add more salt. Nothing had come since the demons and Winchesters and Castiel, but she did not believe anymore and did not trust the angel to guard them very well, for surely there were more important matters in the grand scheme of events with which heaven was concerned than watching over two small, unremarkable lives that were as passing blips upon heaven’s radar. And though the infinite nature of the angels’ existence might be broken in the fight, it wouldn’t make any difference to those deemed insignificant. Several billion people on the planet, who among them knew? No such epic battles ordained by God, only endless skirmishes which dragged in the unsuspecting and spat them out like discarded seeds. Jimmy was one of the fortunate or unfortunate or both. She didn’t try to place him.

Nothing had come, so she guessed that they were no longer useful as leverage. The demons would want to poke at Jimmy the vessel but to confront Castiel the angel was a different matter and perhaps they had decided to refrain. She still kept holy water in the vases, though, because reprieves usually had their endings. Her first reprieve had lasted more than thirty years, but it had ended nonetheless and she could not regain her ignorance anymore than she could regain the rest of her old life. _For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory_ —and she stopped, because there was no reason to think it made any difference.

“—should come over to my place for a sleepover all weekend, it’ll be great!”

“This weekend?”

“Yeah, just hang out and celebrate the end of the project. Milly and Alice are going to be there too.”

“I’ll come over for the day, but I probably won’t stay—”

“Wait, why? It’s going to be great, I have lots of board games and Mom says we can stay up later for TV and—“

“I can’t leave my mom here by herself, it’s just the two of us now. She always says I can go to these things but I don’t think she likes being alone in the house, so—“

She squeezed her eyes closed to shut out Claire’s voice; opened them again because the back of her eyelids was not the oblivion she wanted. Claire should go, she knew to keep herself safe and deserved the fun. Selfishly she thought that it was true, she hated being alone in the house and her bed at night was too big, too much unclaimed space, because Jimmy had always sprawled as he slept and his legs tangled with hers before he would move in and press his mouth softly to the top of her breasts, just so, and she would ghost her fingers up his body to the hollow of his neck, a trailing gesture along his jawline to his ear.

“—and anyway, my daddy used to say that I need to take care of my mom, so I’ll need to help her with dinner like my dad—“

“Claire, your dad’s gone—“

“That’s not changing anything.”

She drew her hand across her eyes and tilted back in her chair and did not cry. Was not crying.

*

She wore the necklace and never took it off even when in the shower. The Winchesters had never explained it very clearly other than to say that it prevented demonic possession, and upon hearing that she had determined to keep it on as long as necessary. Claire did likewise for hers. In the end the necklace might be torn off or be misplaced; but tattoos, such as those the Winchesters wore with no pride but that of gritty practicality, would stubbornly remain and that she would not allow. At the very least they would not let themselves be branded in all ways for ever and ever by heaven or hell.

*

“—please come visit, we haven’t seen you in a while.”

“I know,” she said into the phone. “It’s been some time, but I didn’t feel I should bother you too much—“

On the other end, she heard Dr. Mallory sigh. “Never worry about that,” the doctor said. “You had to worry about Jimmy when he was sick, and you may be my patient’s family member but before that you’re our friend. We all miss you at church too, you’ve deserved absolutely none of the troubles you’ve faced.”

So kind of him to say so, grandfatherly Dr. Mallory who had kept track of Jimmy with puzzled concern. _If it weren’t for him talking about the angel, I’d think him perfectly fine_ , he’d told her and pressed the pills into her hand and continued, _But please make sure he takes these. I pray that this will pass_. So very, very kind of him. It had been easy to vent to the Mallorys about what was happening, the sickness, the disappearance—now she felt that if she started she wouldn’t be able to stop, and so she said very little. It would pain them to think that she was sharing Jimmy’s delusions. Angels did not talk to people like that. Nor did demons visit. Common knowledge, obviously.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

“That’s settled, then. Eleanor’s going to be making apple cobbler, so tell Claire she can look forward to that.”

“I will.” She smiled slowly. “Thank you again.”

After the end of the call, she set the phone to the side and went back to the kitchen sink. The dishes which still needed to be washed far outnumbered the soap-covered ones; she tended to let them sit for a few days before getting around to it. Jimmy had been diligent about doing dishes every evening, but she found that she preferred to wash them after a pile had built up in the sink, lose herself in scrubbing the pots and plates and running her fingers across porcelain and plastic to check for soapy residue. The rhythm of the running water could easily carry her along without much thought for a good half hour.

She could hear the flowers rustling in the vase on the kitchen counter as the nighttime breeze gently brushed past, and thought perhaps she ought to shut the windows for it was becoming cooler than she had expected. So she let the water run across her hands, shook droplets from skin, turned the faucet off and stepped away from the sink.

Nearly bit her tongue, and grabbed the edge of the counter behind her for balance. “Oh my god!” She stared. “Oh my god.”

Jimmy moved out from the dark, shadowed dining room, the dim kitchen light striking first that ridiculous trench coat, then his unshaven face—

She stumbled more than walked over, heaviness at the corner of her eyes until the lines of her vision blurred. She reached up and grabbed the lapels of his coat. “You’re back,” she said, her chest tightening, “you’re _back_ ,” and tugged him forward, so long had she carried nothing more than fading memories and now the sight robbed her of speech and thought, the joy blooming up within her like the rush of a newborn flame, and her stomach turned up and over with the burning warmth—

—and she gazed at his face through a haze of tears; and leaned closer, paused, and then, slowly, “Why… why are you here?”

Her grip loosened and she let go. “Castiel,” she said, and looked away.

The touch of Jimmy’s fingers was light against her chin as Castiel drew her face back around to look her in the eye. “Lucifer has been caged,” Castiel said. “The apocalypse has ended, and we’re returning to heaven to take care of the rest. It’s all over.” Jimmy’s eyes were very blue and still and possessed less of the coldness she had last seen in Castiel—strangely bright and serene, as Jimmy had looked when he first raised his eyes from the boiling water and spoke to her of entities he had believed in but never seen and had learned were there after all, the angels of heaven, the enforcers of God’s will. There lay his belief, vindicated.

The Winchesters had explained a little of the situation to her before they left, which was more than she could say for Castiel, so if the angel thought she would gasp with surprise and widened eyes _Lucifer?_ or _apocalypse?_ she didn’t fulfill any such expectations. “It’s all over,” she repeated dully. “You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“I see.” She fiddled with her shirt and ran her thumbs up and down the stitching. “The Winchesters?”

“They survived.” Castiel didn’t offer any elaboration but Jimmy’s voice changed, slow and scratchy, and for the first time she thought the angel sounded weary.

“I see,” she said again. Only one question in her head but the answer—she shied away, the answer to that question—“And _you?_ ”

Silence, but then Castiel bent Jimmy’s head ever so slightly and replied, and answered both the question she had asked and the question she was afraid to ask: “I am alone in this body.”

“No.”

“Yes. This isn’t—“

“ _No._ ” Pain in her palms, her nails digging into the soft flesh. “You have my husband’s _body_ ,” she hissed. “He gave himself to you. If he didn’t agree, you’d have a lot more trouble figuring out how to walk on this earth in the first place. _Where is he?_ ”

Castiel reached up and pressed a hand against Jimmy’s chest. “I have died twice, and was restored by the will of God. Both times this body had to be taken and remade in Jimmy Novak’s image, but your husband only suffered through the ordeal once. I—” Castiel stopped and in that split second she thought it looked almost like Jimmy himself, her husband’s face flayed raw and open with regret—“I wasn’t strong enough to keep him with me. He is at peace now, in heaven.”

She raised her hands and pressed them against her closed eyelids and brushed away the wetness, trembling. “When?” she mumbled. “When did it happen?” She heard her own words as through a dark fog and thought _oh my god it’s back it’s back_ except there were no demons in her head but the truth, and the truth glittered sharp and sleek like knives.

“Not long after you last saw him,” said Castiel. “I’m sorry.”

And this was the worst: that she knew there was no point in denying Castiel’s words because the unspoken, unheard knowledge had already bloomed in the silence and wilted and rotted inside her all the past year and she had canceled his credit cards and boxed up his books and deluded herself by saying that she couldn’t look at his stuff but in reality she had known this already, that he was gone and he was not coming back and there would be for certain no more of his strange so-called experimental gourmet dinners, or skits with Claire, or even the arguments they would have about laundry responsibilities. His absence they carried with themselves like stones in the gut.

She drew herself up. “Fine then,” she said, choking out the words. Throat tightened and wrapped round with bramble and the dripping would not stop. “He’s gone and dead. Thanks for taking the time to tell us. Is there anything else you want from us?” She cried without shame now. Maybe it was a mercy in the end that Jimmy had been released from Castiel and was no longer dragged around like a rag doll missing more than two years of a life unlived. “Are you done now? You’ve won, right?”

“Your husband was a devout man,” Castiel said. “He didn’t die in vain—”

“—but he _died!_ ”

“I’m sorry.”

“Say that to Claire, she’s upstairs,” she said, words spat like a whip. “Tell her yourself—if you’re going back to heaven you should at least let her see her father’s body.” As if Castiel were a walking morgue.

“Very well.”

Distantly she felt something pressed into her hand, soft and layered. She looked down and laughed raggedly. “Angels know about tissues?” she asked.

“I’ve observed many things throughout my existence,” Castiel said, strangely soft and subdued. “There are some things I’ve begun to understand, and I know that Jimmy loved burgers, and that he loved his daughter and he loved you. I will go to her now.”

“Wait!” She dashed the tissue across her eyes and reached out to grab Castiel. “You talked to him? When he was with you?”

“I didn’t speak with Jimmy once he consented. I thought it better to shield him from the efforts of my duties.”

“Then how would you know—“

“I have learned.” Castiel tilted Jimmy’s head slowly to the side and gazed straight at her and she caught her breath at the look on Jimmy’s face, luminous and gentle and nearly human. “Before I came to earth, he stood outside your house,” it said. “He told me that he was about to lose his family, and I promised him that you and Claire would be protected. And he said yes.”

She stiffened and let go. Castiel closed Jimmy’s eyes and disappeared.

Later she would never quite remember how she made it to the table in the dining room or how there was a chair pulled out for her to sit in; remembered only the old words over and over in her head, _then I’m going to take Claire to my mother’s in the morning_. She pressed her face against her crossed arms on the table top and the sleeves of her top slowly soaked through.

After a while she heard soft footfalls on the stairs.

“Mom?”

She lifted her head. “Hi, dear.” She smiled weakly. “You should be doing your homework.”

“Mom. Castiel came to you too?”

She opened her arms for her daughter, rested her chin on Claire’s shoulder. “Yes. What did it say?”

“Castiel gave me a book and told me to learn about everything and went away. It’s just a weird horror novel with monsters, but it said the book was by a prophet. I don’t get why, isn’t it over? Are the demons still going to come?”

“I don’t know,” she said and pressed her nose into Claire’s neck. More knowledge. To protect themselves. Or keep themselves alive. Either way—

“Castiel gave me a hug and said sorry for not hugging like Daddy.”

Either way—

“Claire,” she said lowly. “If Castiel—or any angel—ever comes back and asks to use you again, you can’t—you can’t say yes. Not like your father. You can’t.”

Claire didn’t answer.

“ _Claire._ ”

She felt Claire breaking from her embrace, and looked up. In her daughter’s eyes the innocence had been stripped bare to gleaming white bone, picked clean by demons and baked hard by the scathing glory of heaven.

“Mom. Daddy’s not here anymore,” said Claire, and now the tears leaked, her face raw and bloated and scrunched up like a baby’s, and her shoulders shook uncontrollably. “And—and Daddy can’t protect us anymore, Mom, and if something comes for us then I can do it, I can still protect you. I should’ve said yes earlier before Daddy got shot, Mom, Castiel kept asking me and I just thought I was making things up so I didn’t say yes early enough. Mommy—“

“Shhhh,” she whispered, “shhh, it’s okay,” and drew Claire back in. Pressed her hands against Claire’s back, smoothed out her hoodie, tightened her hold; and there alongside the beating of her daughter’s heart, Amelia heard the fluttering of her own.


End file.
